CHAPTER VII. - THE CHRISTIAN PROGRAM

 

WITH the first advent of Jesus Christ our Lord came the final outburst of prophetic light as yet granted to our world. Through Him personally, and through His Holy Spirit in the apostles, were revealed things to come

 

the closing section of the Divine program of the world’s history as far as it is at present unfolded. What additions may be yet made to it in the ages to come, who shall say? The infinitude and eternity of God forbid the thought that the section we have now to consider is the last in any absolute sense, but it is the last at present published to mankind.

 

Previously to the first century of our era, the voice of prophecy had for four hundred years been perfectly silent, and it has been similarly hushed ever since. The century of the first advent stands thus as the only one in the course of twenty-three hundred years during which the Omniscient condescended to reveal the future, and exhibit His Divine prescience for human consideration in future ages. Prophecy has no more been granted lavishly and at all times than miracle. Both have been restricted to special eras when they were needed to attest Divine intervention in the affairs of the human race, and when they could best subserve their all important ends. These ends are similar in some aspects, different in others. Miracle serves to convince unbelievers, and to confirm faith, in its own age. Prophecy is intended to do the same in distant ages. The one consequently witnesses for God to man at the beginning of great dispensations of providence; the other at the close of such. It is given at the outset,  that it may by fulfillment demonstrate its own inspiration of God at the end of the age. The miracles of 1800 years ago have so far lost their force in our days that their very occurrence is doubted and denied. But the power of fulfilled prophecy, to prove the existence and the providential government of God, only increases as time passes on, and will increase until the next great climax in the history of our race. It is the peculiar witness in the last days, and by neglecting it the Church deprives herself of the help of the most effective weapon in her armoury for the combat with modern unbelief. If Jesus Christ revealed the future well-nigh two thousand years ago, and if intervening ages have fulfilled every one of His predictions, and can be shown to have done so, what shall we say? what shall we think? Shall we lightly esteem His mission? Shall we give no heed to His message from God? Shall we dare to despise His warnings? Shall we argue that, though He foretold a hundred events, and ninety-five of them have come true, we need not anticipate the fulfillment of the remaining five? Or shall we bow the head and worship, and believe with the heart His every word?

 

The fact that we have 1800 years of authentic and detailed history with which to compare and by which to test the New Testament prophecies gives them a special evidential value.

 

There can be no question as to the date of these predictions. Sceptics may raise a cloud of dust about the date of Daniel, though their desperate efforts to assign it an epoch late enough to deprive it of its conspicuously prophetic character fail to conceal its true origin, but they cannot do the same about the New Testament. It was not concocted and published in modern times, or even in the middle ages. Abundant writings still extant of the first and second centuries attest that it was already in wide circulation in Asia, Africa, and even Europe, and that is enough for our argument. We need not pause to settle the exact date of each Gospel, nor of each of the letters of the Apostle Paul. We know that even the Apocalypse of St. Johnwhich was published long after all the rest of the New Testament dates from the close of the first century, and that therefore, in considering the final section of our program, we may be confident that it was published to the world 1800 years ago, the bulk of it between AD. 38 and A.D. 70, and the last work in A.D. 96 or 97. If we can prove the fulfillment of its predictions, consequently, we have unquestionable evidence of inspiration, and of Divine foreknowledge and providence.

 

No human sagacity could have correctly outlined the history of the eighteen Christian centuries, complicated and marvelous as it has been. Superhuman wisdom prompted the utterances and guided the pens of the prophets of the New Testament as of those of the old. This section of the program is in some senses the most interesting of any to Christian students, as it deals with our own dispensation, predicts our own experiences, and enlarges on our own hopes. It contains, moreover, chronological statements of peculiar interest, as indicating our own position in the stream of time, and our proximity to the end of the present age. Further, it not only sketches the present condition of Christendom, affording as it does so precious practical guidance, but it reaches out into the ages to come far more fully than any previous portion of the program, so that its vistas of glory and joy are calculated to sustain faith and hope in these dark and perilous times of doubt and infidelity.

 

The subject is so rich and full a one that our introductory sketch must be brief, but a few words seem needful to connect this first advent era and Christian outburst of prophetic light with that which occurred in the captivity and restoration era, on which we dwelt in the last chapter.

 

When the Persian monarch Artaxerxes passed away, his commission to Nehemiah had been executed. Jerusalem was once more the defensible capital of a re-constituted state and nation, and the temple was once more the center of the reestablished worship of God. Both the national polity and the national religion were again visible among men, and recognized by neighbouring nations. But the centuries which intervened between the return from Babylon and the advent of Christ were to the restored Jews in Palestine anything but a time of peace or an era of national glory. They were, to some extent, like sheep among wild beasts. Weak, small, and defenceless, they fell successively under the fierce pagan rulers of the second, third, and fourth of the wild-beast Gentile empires which dominated one after the other during the four or five centuries which preceded the advent of Christ.

 

The restored remnant was at first too feeble and too obscure to be of much account among men. The Medo-Persian kings were for the most part kind to the Jews, and even Alexander showed them favour.

 

Judea had been, after the death of Nehemiah, added to the prefecture of Syria, and it ultimately shared in the miserable lot of that province, and became the battlefield of opposing nations. The Jews suffered very severely in the long struggles and incessant warfare which was waged, on the break-up of the Greek empire, between the Ptolemies of Egypt and the Seleucids of Syria. In the second century before Christ especially, they passed through a most bitter experience. Antiochus Epiphanes, the infamous monster whoas is agreed by mostforeshadowed a greater persecutor still, caused them the severest sufferings. At one time he took Jerusalem by storm, slew 40, 000 of the Jews, and sold as many more into slavery, and defiled the temple by offering a sow on the altar, and sprinkling the broth of it all over the sacred enclosures. He tried to compel the nation to abandon the faith of their fathers, and succeeded in inducing many to apostatize. But after the Babylonish captivity Israel dreaded and detested the idolatry to which in earlier ages they had been so prone, and nothing could induce them to comply with the tyrant’s orders. At last, in B.C. 168, he ordered his general, Apollonius, to destroy Jerusalem; and the order was as far as possible carried into execution. The men were put to the sword, and the women and children enslaved. The houses were demolished or fired, and the walls broken down the temple was re-dedicated to Jupiter, and Antiochus erected his statue on the altar of burnt-offering. It was a rehearsal on a small, brief scale of the subsequent doings of the Roman soldiery of Titus. Antiochus subsequently swore that he would destroy the entire nation of the Jews, and make a common cemetery for them at Jerusalem. But God smote him, and he died in torment, like Herod in after-days.

 

In these dark and dreadful times Jewish faith and heroism shone more brightly, perhaps, than at any previous or subsequent period. Had it not done so, Judaism might have become extinct, under the combined influences of persecution from without and apostasy within. But Israel’s great mission was not over then, any more than it is over now. The people were preserved once more. The bush burned with fire, but it was not consumed. When hope itself was almost dead, up rose the Asmonean Mattathias, and his still more illustrious son, Judas Maccabeus, and did exploits for their faith and people. They delivered Israel, cleansed the temple, restored the Divine worship, and ruled as priests and princes in Jerusalem for many generations. The struggle with this fierce storm had strengthened the faith and courage of the Jews, and they clung to their monotheistic creed more firmly than ever.

 

The Asmoneans continued to rule the Jews under the later Syro-Macedonian monarchs until family dissensions arose, and a struggle for power, in which Aristobulus called in the help of the then rapidly rising Romans. Judea soon became tributary to the fourth empire, which was at the time in its full career of conquest, and fast approaching its day of undisputed sway. An Idumean named Antipater was subsequently, by Julius Caesar, made procurator of Judea, and from this man were descended the Herods who ruled the Jews in the days of Christ. An Edomite dynasty would, in any case, have been hateful to the Jews. Its outrageous vices made the Herodian dynasty peculiarly so. But they were powerless to resist the iron will of Rome, though often sorely tempted to revolt; and the Herods, by a cruel tyranny, kept the people down. Never, therefore, was the longing expectation of the advent of Messiah to deliver Israel stronger or more intense than at the time when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea.

 

It is important, however, to realize that at that time the Jews of Palestine formed only a minority of the Jewish nation. To say nothing of the ten tribes, whose fate and whose locality were more or less unknown, the number of the two tribes which had returned from Babylon to Judea was very small compared with their whole number. This relative proportion continued to exist in the days of our Lord. The home Jews were far less numerous than the foreign Jews, who were known as ‘the dispersion.” True, they were no longer scattered as a penal judgment, or by the will and power of Gentile conquerors. They were voluntary exiles, but exiles still, whatever the motive of business or pleasure, policy or interest, which kept them so. Year by year the temple courts were thronged with crowds of foreign JewsJews ‘out of every nation under heaven, ‘ as they were ‘when the day of Pentecost was fully come.’ A Babel of languages might be heard in the streets of Jerusalem, even as there would be now were Jews from every land to congregate in one city.

 

But, though living among other nations, all these Jews looked to Jerusalem as their center, and felt themselves strangers in the lands where they dwelt. There was an Eastern and a Western dispersion. The Babylonian Jews, and all who dwelt beyond the Euphrates, were much more closely connected with the restored people than were the Western dispersion. From the language which they spoke, they were called Hebrews as much as those who lived in Palestine. They were the ‘Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and dwellers in Mesopotamia’ mentioned among the crowds gathered in Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost. The Western dispersion included all the rest, the pilgrims from Cappadocia, Pontus, Phrygia, Pamphylia, Egypt, Cyrene, and Rorpe. Josephus and Philo estimate that millions of Jews belonged to the Eastern dispersion, which was the most influential and wealthy part of the nation. The Persian monarchs had treated the Jews kindly, Alexander the Great had favoured them, the Parthians, who succeeded the Seleucidae in governing those regions, found them so influential that they avoided making enemies of them, and even the Romans in the first century before Christ shrank from provoking their hostility. They were united, though scattered, and had already become a sort of world nation, as they still are. The Calendar of the feasts of the Lord observed by this Eastern dispersion was identical with that of Jerusalem, the Sanhedrim indicating to them by fire signals from mountain top to mountain top the visibility of the new moon. The Babylonian Rabbis were very highly esteemed at Jerusalem. Ezra, Rabbi Hillel, and Rabbi Chija, who all three did good service in restoring the law, were from Babylon. This dispersion extended to the Black Sea, northward to the Caspian, and eastward as far as India. They were intensely Jewish, kept their genealogies with the utmost strictness, and observed the customs of the Talmud as well as the precepts of the law.

 

They must not be confounded with the wanderers of the ten tribes, whose destiny is involved in obscurity, and the only indications of whom from early sources are laid in the countries to the north of India, the Kurdish mountains of Armenia, and the region of the Caucasus. They ceased to be known as Jews at all, with the exception of the comparatively few who settled in Palestine, like the family of Anna, which belonged to the tribe of Asher, and the few who had mingled with the exiles of Babylon, and formed part of that Eastern dispersion which never lost its nationality.

 

It was otherwise, however, with the Grecian, or Western dispersion. This also was very extensiveAsia Minor, Egypt, Greece, Rome, Spain, and other lands contained at the time of the first advent very numerous Jewish colonies and scattered residents. They were merchants, traders, doctors, craftsmen, and artisans; and though they were regarded as strangers and foreigners by the heathen, and often hated on account of their peculiar laws and customs, yet their higher religious faith had its influence on the Grecianized world which despised them, and their sacred writings, translated into Greek more than two hundred years before Christ, were widely known and read among philosophers. The Jews, in their turn, felt strongly the effect of the mental atmosphere in which they lived. The Stoic and Epicurean philosophies current in those centuries could not but affect the Jewish mind, with its keen and meditative cast. Their faith as Jews rested on authority, on Divine revelation. But what were the grounds of this authority, what the proofs of this revelation? These questions never troubled the Rabbis of Palestine and the East. But they were rife among the Jews of Alexandria and the Mediterranean. Young Judaism, waking up under the influence of what was to them modern thought, were tempted to compromise, to endeavour to conciliate Greek philosophy, to admit that Socrates as well as Moses was inspired, and to try to blend the teachings of Plato with those of the Pentateuch. The Palestinian Jews so dreaded the influence of Hellenistic writings that they forbade their perusal merely, and endeavoured to repress the curiosity awakened by them about the philosophies of Greece. When a young Rabbi, Ben Dama, asked his uncle whether, since he had thoroughly mastered every aspect of the law, he might not study Greek philosophy, the old Rabbi referred him to the words of Joshua about meditating in the law day and night ‘ Go search for the hour which is neither day nor night; in it thou mayest study Greek philosophy.’  Edersheim ‘ Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, ‘ p. 22.

 

Not only the books of the Apocrypha, but a whole literature, sprang up, in the two centuries preceding the advent, from the effort to blend Grecian thought and Hebrew revelation. Some of it remains to this day, though much has perished. Philo of Alexandria was perhaps the greatest of uninspired Jewish writers, and lived about twenty years before Christ. He treated the Old Testament as symbolical, and drew from it, by very arbitrary interpretations, doctrines which approached those of the popular philosophies. His writings and similar ones bridged over to some extent the great gulf between Judaism and Greek thought; and though they were full of error, they led to a Gentile consideration of the Jewish Scriptures. Alexandria, where three worlds meet Europe, Asia, and Africaa city then of about a million inhabitants, was the home of this Jewish Hellenism; an eighth of the people were Jews, synagogues abounded, and the city had a great Jewish basilica, or cathedral. Rome also had its synagogues and its large Jewish population, which was cordially hated by the rest of the people.

 

But wherever they dwelt, and however much they were Grecianized, the scattered Jews in east, west, north, and south, were all one in their expectation of a coming Messiah. This especially united them amid many diversities of language, custom, and thought. The links which bound them together werea common creed, a common life, a common center, and a common hope.’ They all believed in the God of Abraham, in the law of Moses, in the observance of the Sabbath, and feasts and fasts of Leviticus; and they all maintained synagogue worship. Jerusalem was the center of the world to the Jew, whether he lived on the Euphrates, the Nile, or the Tiber; and thither, whenever possible, the pilgrim proceeded, at least once in his life. The advent of Messiah to deliver and restore them all to Palestine was the common hope of Jews both in the East and in the West, and never was ‘that hope stronger or so full of expectancy as at the time of the first advent. The unrest and expectancy were heightened by the fact that the chronological prophecy of the seventy weeks from Artaxerxes pointed to the near future as the time of Messiah’s manifestation. The hour at which the great Deliverer was due would soon strike. Daniel’s prophecy was, it was true, mysterious, and did not say much about the glorious kingdom which they anticipated from other sacred promises and predictions. But still it fixed the time for Messiah’s advent; and when He was come, He would restore all things. This prophecy of the seventy weeks would not seem to have been generally understood, but it was influential with the pious few who looked for redemption like the godly Anna, and waited like Simeon for the consolation of Israel.

 

Such then was the condition of the chosen people at the time when the last section of the prophetic program was published. There was a vast dispersion in all lands: the ‘Hebrew, ‘ or Eastern one, speaking Aramean, intensely conservative, ritualistic, and learned in Rabbinic and Talmudic lore; the Western one, progressive, liberal, Hellenized, and philosophic; and between the two the nation, in its own home, Palestine, gathered around its restored temple, yet oppressed by aliens and under tribute, hating its Gentile rulers, though unable to oppose them, and waiting impatiently for Messiah to deliver them and destroy their foes.

 

The ancient synagogue referred to Messiah not only all the passages in the Psalms and prophets which Christians so refer, but many more. More than four hundred and fifty passages of the Old Testament are by ancient Rabbinic writings applied to the coming Messiah; 75 from the Pentateuch, 243 from the prophets, and 138 from the Hagiographa. To the Jewish mind every hope and expectation centerd in the Messianic age. The present night might be dark, but the coming day would be glorious, and meantime the midnight sky was illuminated by the brilliant stars and constellations of Messianic prophecy. Their expectation was of a Messiah King, however, rather than of a Messiah Savior, and their hope was of One who should be the glory of His people Israel, rather than a light to lighten the Gentiles. Their own national exaltation was the great result to be attained, for there reigned among them an overweening idea of their exclusive divine privileges. In the glory of the prospect of their own universal domination they to some extent forgot the great Deliverer who was to raise them from their low estate to the pinnacle of earthly glory. Yet there are passages in the writings of the Rabbis which intimate that some of them realized that Messiah would he more than human and even super-angelic, and also that through Him reconciliation for Israel’s sins would somehow he effected. With passages like Isaiah liii. and Daniel ix., it would indeed have been impossible that such thoughts should not have been forced on some minds. But Jewish understanding of these evangelical predictions was hazy, confused, and even contradictory, and the national mind rested only on the contrasted and more numerous predictions of the glorious earthly kingdom which Messiah was to found.

 

And what was the condition of the Gentile world outside? The fourth empire was in its glory. The ‘dreadful and terrible and exceedingly strong’ wild beast had been for some time in the ascendant, ravaging, devouring, and breaking in pieces the nations with its great iron teeth, and stamping the residue with the feet of it, as Daniel had predicted.

 

The empire of Rome filled the scene. Julius Caesar had subdued the world; Augustus ruled it. From the Euphrates to the Atlantic, and from the Sahara to the German Ocean, the earth was for the first time crushed, stilled, united under one mighty sceptre. Liberty was dead. The paw of the Roman wild beast had pressed on her heart until it ceased to beat. All nations bowed in submission before the mighty Caesar. The Mediterranean Sea was a Roman lake. ‘The empire of the Romans, ‘ says Gibbon, ‘filled the world; and when that empire fell into the hands of a single person, the world became a safe and dreary prison for his enemies.

 

Gibbon, as we saw before, tells us that the empire was 2, 000 miles in depth from north to south, from the wall of Antoninus and the northern limits of Dacia, to Mount Atlas and the tropic of Cancer, and 3, 000 miles in length, and that it contained 1, 600, 000 acres of fertile land in the finest part of the temperate zone. The capital of this vast empire was a magnificent city, whose population is variously given as from 1, 200, 000 to six or seven millions, varying probably according to the amount of suburbs included. The civilized world had been welded into one great monarchy for the first time, and the temple of Janus was closed, announcing that the earth was at peace, twenty-three years before the birth of Christ. This great calm of the stormy sea of nations lasted long, , for who could op pose such overwhelming power? The commands of the Roman Caesar were obeyed through all this vast domain, and its inhabitants were all citizens of one great state.

 

This widespread power of Rome was one of the preparations for the advent of the world’s Redeemer. Jewish law, Grecian philosophy, and Roman conquest and policy had each done its preparatory work. Conscience had been educated, language refined and perfected, and fitted to receive a new and final revelation, while the habitable world had been united under a wise and strong government, opened up by Roman roads and posts, and tranquillized by Roman civilization.

 

Morally and socially also the state of things was ripe for a fresh crisis of Divine interference and illumination. The world was, in spite of the peace and plenty which prevailed, profoundly unhappy. The old faiths had lost their power. ‘The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true, by the philosopher as equally false, and by the magistrate as equally useful.’ The rankest polytheism was the result, and religion was dissociated from morality. Irreligion was fashionable, immortality was denied, and vice reigned as a result.

 

One of the strongest indications of the hopeless moral condition of the Roman world was the utter and incredible degradation and suffering of the masses of the people. The great were very powerful, the rich were marvelously and uselessly wealthy. The small and select upper class had all the pleasures and refinements that luxury could invent or selfishness desire; magnificent cities studded the empire, architecture was in its glory, and an elegant literature flourished; but all this was only for the fewthe very, very few. The misery of the industrial classes was indescribable. The tillers of the soil, forming everywhere the largest part of the population, in Europe four-fifths, and the domestic slaves of the rich and noble, individuals among whom sometimes held many hundreds or even thousands of such, were beyond the pale of the law, and regarded as scarcely superior to cattle. Augustus himself at one time gave up to their masters 30, 000 slaves, who had fought for Sextus Pompeius, to be executed,  though he had pledged his word not to do so!

 

Even the good Trajan amused the populace for 123 days by the horrid spectacle of 10, 000 slaves killing each other in fights in the amphitheatre! The rural peasantry were oppressed and ground to the earth by cruel bondage. The slaves won in war were treated worst of all. These wretched beings worked almost constantly with chains on their feet; they were worn down with fatigue in order to crush their spirit, and were shut up nightly in subterraneous holes. The frightful sufferings of so large a portion of the population, its bitter hatred against its oppressors, produced continual servile insurrections, plots, assassinations, poisonings. In vain did a sanguinary law condemn to death all the slaves of a master who had been assassinated; vengeance and despair multiplied crime and violence.  Sismondi ‘Fall of the Roman Empire, ‘ vol. i. Page 23

 

The condition of woman, even in the highest ranks, was one of slavery. The law regarded her as the property of her husband. The bonds of marriage were utterly relaxed, and immorality reigned among all classes. Tacitus speaks with amazement of the purity and fidelity to the marriage bond which existed among the comparatively uncivilized Germans. In every relation of life the weak were oppressed. Might was esteemed right. There was no fear of God, no hope of life after death, no law of love and brotherhood. Regarded from a moral standpoint, nothing could well be worse than the Roman world into which Christ was born. Darkness covered the nations. But the light of the world arose with healing in its beams, and moral light, religious light, and prophetic light alike streamed forth in abundance. A very era of light succeeded an era of darkness so dense that it is difficult for us even to conceive it.

 

Such then was the political, moral, and religious state of the Gentile world in the first century of our era, at the crisis when the final section of the Divine program of human history was given, the foreview of the dispensation in which we live.

 

And who was the channel of the new revelation? It was neither David, the founder of Jewish monarchy, nor Nebuchadnezzar, the founder of Gentile monarchy, but

 

CHRIST, THE FOUNDER OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD.

 

The role of history contains no other name that can for a single moment be placed beside that of Jesus of Nazareth under any one single aspect of His wonderful character and career. He came fulfilling all previous prophecy: the seed of the woman, He crushed the serpent’s head, the seed of Abraham, He has brought blessing to all nations; the seed of David, He has founded a kingdom that shall never end; the Messiah of Israel, He has ‘finished transgressions, and made an end of sins, made reconciliation for iniquity, and brought in everlasting righteousness.’ He proved Himself moreover, to be the Prophet of whom Moses spoke, and it is in this last character as a prophet that we have now to regard Him as the author of this, the last section of the Divine program of the world’s history.

 

‘God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days SPOKEN UNTO US BY HIS SON, whom He hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also He made the worlds.’ {#Heb 2:14}

 

This statement includes the prophetic utterances of Christ, though it goes far beyond them, and refers principally to the revelation made by Him as a wholethat wonderful revelation of God which was the main object of His incarnation, life, and death. ‘I have declared unto them Thy name’ (or character), ‘and will declare it, ‘ He said, in His last prayer; and to His disciples, ‘He that hath seen Me, hath seen the Father.’

 

From the full and glorious moral and spiritual revelations made by Christ, from all His wonderful and new doctrinal teachings, we must, however, turn our thoughts. They are not here our theme. He illumined every subject of vital importance to mankind; to receive His teachings was and is to have eternal life. But our present subject is limited to that foreview of future events given directly or indirectly by the Prince of prophets, and which has come down to us from the first century of our era. We must not, indeed, dwell on the whole, even of it,  for it is too vast, and it extends to yet future ages. We must confine ourselves mainly to that portion of it which has already been fulfilled by history.

 

The New Testament prophecies, as will at once be recognized, divide themselves naturally into four groups.

 

I. There are first the beautiful annunciatory predictions of the approaching advent of Christ by the angels, to Zacharias and Mary, and then to the shepherds, followed by the exultant prophetic songs of Zacharias and Mary, and by the words of Simeon and John the Baptist. These were partly fulfilled in gospel history, though in their full scope they embrace the present and the future. But on them we need not dwell; they are but as the porch to the temple. They mark, however, the commencement of the new prophetic era.

 

II. The predictions, parabolic and plain, of our Lord Himself in the days of His flesh.

 

III. The revelations given by the Holy Ghost to the apostles, and through themand especially through Paul to the Church.

 

IV. The latest revelation of Christ risen and glorified, from heaven to John in Patmos ‘The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave to Him, to show unto His servants things which must shortly come to pass, ‘ and which He sent and signified by His angel to His servant John.

 

This last prophecy of the Bible is closely related to the entire Old Testament, and to the prophetic parables of Christ. It is given by the same person, deals with the same

 

theme, is couched in the same symbolic form, and is perfectly harmonious in its statements with all the rest of the program.

 

For brevity’s sake we shall not refer in detail to all the Scriptures to which we must now allude, much less quote them in full. This is not, indeed, needful. We may count on our readers’ familiarity with the text of the New Testament. Our endeavour will be merely to recall their knowledge, both of predictions and events, in order to lead them fairly to compare the two, and draw the supremely important inferences which are suggested by the comparison. We begin, then, by a consideration of

 

OUR LORD’S OWN PREDICTIONS

 

during His earthly life, both parabolic and plain. That many of even His earliest parables are prophetic none can question. Of the thirty or three and thirty parables in the Gospels, fifteen or sixteen, at least, are of this character. Take, first, the group recorded in Matthew xiii., which were given near the commencement of Christ’s public ministry. In them, omittingfor the sake of simplicity of statement and clearness of impressionall detail,  He drew an outline blank map, as it were, of the eighteen Christian centuries. He described, in advance, the broad aspects of the new dispensation He was about to inaugurate.

 

Under various similitudes of the kingdom of heaven,  He presented the essential characteristics of the Christian age as contrasted with the Jewish age, then drawing to a close. The revelation made in the parables of the sower sowing the seed, the wheat and tares, the mustard seed, the leaven working in the three measures of meal, the treasure hid in the field, the pearl of great price, and the net cast into the sea, was a startlingly new one when it was given, though long familiarity with its fulfillment makes it seem most natural to us.

 

It is the same with our Lord’s later parables, and especially with His plain predictions in non-parabolic form. Perplexing, and almost incredible, even on His authority, to Jewish minds, filled with expectation of the future such as we have previously considered, must have been the predictions given in such parables as those of the wicked husbandman who killed the heir, and lost the vineyard; the marriage of the king’s son; the nobleman who went into a far country, and of whom his citizens said, ‘We will not have this man to reign over us’; of the talents used or wasted in a long interval which was to elapse before the establishment of the kingdom; of the dark night-watch of the ten virgins for the expected bridegroom, which was so prolonged that they all slumbered and slept;all these foreviews were not only puzzling, but painfully startling, to men convinced that Messiah had come, and that the long-promised kingdom of God, in all its glory, was on the point of being introduced by Him.

 

For what did all these parables with ever-increasing clearness foretell? A course of history with Which we are acquainted as well as with the air we breathe, but which in the first century of our era must have seemed to Jew and Gentile alike not only unnatural, improbable, impossible, but absolutely inconceivable. As a matter of fact, they could not, and did not, conceive it, even after all the prophetic instructions of their Lord and Master. Notwithstanding all He had foretold them to the contrary, they still thought that the kingdom of God would immediately appear; and even as they stood around the ascended Savior in their last earthly interview, they asked: ‘Lord, wilt Thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?’

 

It is exceedingly difficult for us to divest ourselves of our Christian knowledge and consciousness, and transport ourselves in imagination back into the mental and moral condition of the society in the midst of which Jesus Christ promulgated this program of the future. Yet we must endeavour to do this if we would estimate aright the altogether supernatural character of the foreview. It was like a description of the tropics given to Lapps and Eskimos, who have seen nothing but snow and ice, aurora borealis, and the midnight sun! It was like a sketch of the wide ocean presented to men who had no conception of anything but the inside of a temple! They could not take it in: it was too strangely incredible! He could not mean what He said! They sought explanation, hoping to elucidate the mystery, but His interpretations only added to it instead. For, combining in one view all the predictive utterances of Christ, what did He announce as the main features of the age which He was about to inaugurate? Let us try, as we enumerate them one by one, to regard them from the standpoint of Peter or John, as if we were wholly ignorant of all that has since happened in the world.

 

They were convinced that Christ was the long-looked-for Messiah, and they were expecting that He would bring consolation to Israel, deliverance, exaltation, and supremacy. They had heard out of the law that He was to abide for ever, that of the increase of His kingdom there would be no end, that He would sit on the throne of David for ever, and be the glory of His people Israel. They expected, and rightly expected, from Old Testament prophecy, that He would exalt the Jews, and destroy their enemies, and make Jerusalem the joy of the whole earth. Having long delayed His advent, the Anointed of God, the Christ, the King, the Lion of the tribe of Judah was at last come. They had no doubt of it. ‘Rabbi, Thou art the Son of God, Thou art the King of Israel.’ At last the Son and Lord of David was in their midst, the King was present, the kingdom must follow!

 

But the parables and predictions of Jesus assured them, on the contrary, that a future of a wholly different character lay before them and the world. He did not set aside or destroy their hope and expectation of the oft-predicted kingdom of God on earth. On the contrary, He confirmed their expectation of it, and put into their lips a prayer for its advent:

 

‘Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.’ It would come at last, it would be revealed in due time. But

 

AN INTERMEDIATE PROSPECT

 

of an entirely different character was opened to their astonished gaze. It was predicted by our Lord

 

I. That He Himself, the King, would be rejected. The husbandmen would say, ‘This is the heir; come, let us kill him.’ The invited guests would refuse to come to the marriage, and would even slay the messengers sent to invite them. The citizens would say, ‘We will not have this man to reign over us.’ The builders would reject the stone which should become head of the corner. And mingled with these and similar symbolic intimations were still plainer hints of the foreseen issue. He told them that the Son of man would be ‘lifted up, ‘ like the serpent in the wilderness; that He, when He was ‘lifted up, ‘ would draw all men to Him. He spoke of His blood, or sacrificed life, being the life of the world; told them He was going to lay it down, and at last distinctly predicted that the Jews would deliver Him to the Romans, and that they would crucify Him; that, like Jonas, He would be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth; and that though, like Jonas, He would rise again, yet that it would not be to destroy His enemies and establish His reign on earth. On the contrary, before He did that, the King would go into ‘a far country, to receive investiture of His kingdom and to return, as Archelaus, king of Judea, had recently gone to Rome to be invested by Caesar with his crown, that there would be opportunity for the evil servant to say, ‘My Lord delayeth His coming, ‘ to smite his fellow-servants, and eat, and drink, and be drunken; that there would be time for a prolonged probation of the King’s servants, and for use or misuse of the talents committed to their care; that it would not be till ’after a long time’ that the Lord of the servants would return to take account of them; and at last, in plainer words, that He was returning to heaven, where He would prepare a place for them, going back to the Father from whom He had come forth; and that the only kingdom which would then be established would be a kingdom of heaven, that is, a rule which would be exercised by a king unseen on earth exalted in heaven.

 

This was the first main, clear, strong feature of Christ’s program of the future. No one can question its prominence in His predictions, and no one can doubt that it was a strange, unexpected, and incredible announcement to those who heard it. The Jews express their astonishment and mental confusion. ‘How sayest Thou, The Son of man must be lifted up? The law says that the Christ will abide for ever!’ But the great Prophet repeated again and again, without a shadow of hesitation or wavering, that it would be even so.

 

Was it mere human foresight that gave this prophecy? Was it likely that the eager, impatient, enthusiastic, and ambitious Jewish people would reject and murder their mighty, miracle-working, Divine Messiah, when, after ages of waiting expectation, He was at last in their midst? Was such a prediction one which a mere man in Christ’s position would have put forward? Would authors of spurious gospels put such a program into the lips of their imaginary hero? Would one who was merely acting the role of Israel’s Messiah have counted certainly on his own rejection, and persisted in predicting it? The adhesion and enthusiasm of the crowds that shouted ‘Hosanna!’ never misled for a moment or blinded Christ to what was coming. He foresaw the cross; He foretold the cross, and the grave, and the ascension from Olivet, when none but Himself could have even conceived such events. And we know what happened.

 

II. But that was not all! Christ foresaw and foretold also the twofold result of this apparent miscarriage of His mission as Messiah: the fall of Judaism and the rise of Christianity. Apart from all question of the invisible spiritual consequences, the eternal salvation of millionsa consideration which as an invisible, intangible one to sight and sense, we must not here adduceHe foresaw and foretold the approach of two conspicuous and contrasted series of outward events,  each series extending over agesevents of national and cosmopolitan importance; events of a mundane, material, historic nature, about which no two opinions can possibly be entertained events which submit themselves to the evidence of our senses, which historians could record and artists paint, and poets and musicians sing; events most momentous in the history of humanity. Such have unquestionably been the fall of Judaism and the rise of Christendom.

 

Neither of these great changes was in the days of Christ within the range of the most keen-sighted mental vision; no human sagacity could descry anywhere on the horizon a cloud as big even as a man’s hand portending their approach. The prescience that anticipated and foretold them was and must have been, therefore, supernaturalDivine.

 

And first, as to THE FALL OF JUDAISM. The Savior’s revelations on the subject were, as usual, progressivehints only at first, then statements, then full and clear descriptions. The moral reason for and cause of the event is also exhibited: the Jews are made to pronounce their own doom. What would the householder do to the disloyal men who had killed the heir of the vineyard? ‘He will miserably destroy those wicked men, ‘ say the chief priests and elders of the people, ‘and will let out the vineyard to other husbandmen, who will render him the fruits in their season.’ The Lord endorses their judgment, and adds, ‘Ye are the men!’ For He says, ‘The kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof.’ Here is foretold a loss of all the peculiar privileges of Judaism, as a result of their rejection of Christ; as well as that otherssome who had never enjoyed it previouslywould gain ‘the kingdom of God, ‘ which they would lose.

 

The same prediction was oft repeated. The carefully cultured but still fruitless tree would, after long and patient waiting, be cut down. The barren fig. tree afforded a visible symbol of what was to happen to the nation when it withered away. The enemies who would not have the King to reign over them would be slain before His face. Strangers from the east and from the west would sit down in the kingdom with Abraham, while the children of the kingdom would be cast out. As the great tragedy drew near its climax, and the leaders of Israel ranged themselves decidedly against their Messiah, the utterances of Christ became plainer. Not that His convictions were deepened by such indications of what was likely to come, but that He would not anticipate rejection too distinctly before it had been resolved on by His foes. It was only in the last week of His earthly life that He spoke out fully on this subject, and His most memorable and touching utterance about it was made on that festive Palm Sunday, when, for a brief moment, it seemed as if the result might be different. Amid thousands of grateful disciplesthe lame and the blind whom He had healed, the lepers whom He had cleansed, the very dead whom He had raised, and the multitudes whom He had taughtZion’s King came to her that day, meek, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt, the foal of an ass. The crowd were waving palms of victory as they escorted Him from Bethany, and laying their garments for Him to ride over. The children sang ‘Hosanna!’ and greeted Him as Son of David. But the present could not conceal from Him the future, and as He approached Jerusalem His tears flowed as He bewailed, in tender and animated utterance, her terrible approaching fate and self-inflicted doom. She had rejected all His loving efforts, and failed to recognize her day of gracious Divine visitation. In sad and solemn prophecy Jesus foretold, ‘The days shall come upon thee, that thine enemies shall cast a trench about thee, and compass thee round, and keep thee in on every side, and shall lay thee even with the ground, and thy children within thee; and they shall not leave in thee one stone upon another.’

 

This seemed a strange future to be announced to Israel by the Messiah, for whom she had so longed and waited, as the harbinger of better and brighter days. It was enough to shock men who were indulging half-worldly and half-religious ideas of approaching deliverance from their enemies, and triumph over all Gentile foes. What! their enemies not only to rule them as Herod, Pilate, and Caesar were already doing, but actually to raze Jerusalem to the ground!

 

Judea was then a flourishing province of the mighty Roman empire. Jesus Christ was simply a young Galilean prophet to the outward eye, nothing more. The Herodian dynasty was safely seated on the throne, and the templeof which Jesus said, ‘Your house is left unto you desolate’had been rebuilt in much magnificence and almost regardless of cost; cities and palaces of Roman and Grecian architecture studded the land; Roman soldiery guarded the country, and kept the people in order. Nothing boded change, ruin, banishment, extermination for some, and age-long exile even unto this day for others. How could even the unjust execution of any individual involve such consequences? Could anything be more unlikely than the delivery, not to say fulfillment, of these predictions? Imagine a parallel case. Some young and humble religious teacher who has, however, great power and originality, comes up to London from the northern counties, takes the position of a bold reformer, claims the right to overthrow existing religious abuses, upbraids the Church leaders of the land for their simony, worldliness, and traditional customs opposed to the word of God, ventures to purify the Church by some bold, practical measures, is, in consequence, arrested and accused by those who reject his religious pretensions. He is tried and condemnedand then, without the least personal feeling, but seriously, sadly, and even solemnly, he predicts that the result of his rejection will be the utter overthrow of the Protestant religion, the downfall of the British empire, the complete destruction of St. Paul’s and Westminster Abbey, so that not one stone will be left on another, and ages of a foreign occupation of England!

 

Yet it was thus Jesus of Nazareth, the prophet of Galilee, forewarned the Jews as to the results of their rejecting Him and the wonderful fact is that the event justified the prediction,  and all subsequent history attested its Divine inspiration.

 

He said much more on the subject to His disciples shortly afterwards. Seated together with Him on the Mount of Olives, and gazing across the valley of Jehoshaphat on the striking view of Jerusalem outspread before them, with its beautiful temple, and temple area, in the foreground, the twelve, pondering the sad future He had predicted for their holy house, and finding it hard to believe, remarked to Him, in a deprecatory, expostulating tone, on the extent, variety, magnificence, and solidity of the structures recently erected by Herod. They pointed out how richly the temple was adorned with goodly stones and gifts, and seemed anxious to elicit, if possible, some qualification, if not contradiction, of the doom that had been foretold. It was a perfect vision of beauty from that point, with its marble courts and golden gates glittering in the glorious sunshine of the East, and contrasting in its massive magnificence with the graceful palms, the feathery tamarisk, and the dark cypress around.

 

The scene was the pride of Jewish hearts, and, as they challenged Christ’s admiration of it, His gaze was troubled, and in accents of deep sincerity and sorrow He assured them that His previously expressed anticipation was only too correct. ‘See ye not all these things? verily I say unto you, There shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.’ He then went on to assure them that they would themselves see Jerusalem compassed with idolatrous Gentile armies; and that when they did so, they and all His Judean disciples should flee to the mountains, for that days of dreadful vengeance would then be commencing; that a time of great and unparalleled tribulation for the Jews would be opening; that many of them would fall by the edge of the sword, many more be led away captive into all nations, and that Jerusalem itself would not only be taken and destroyed, but that the very site of it wouldthroughout an entire dispensationbe held by Gentile conquerors. ‘Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles, ‘ He prophesied, ‘until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled.’ Now, as the times of the Jews,  or Jewish age, had lasted for 2, 000 years, these words might well suggest to the disciples that ‘the times of the Gentiles’ would be no brief seventy years, like the Babylonian captivity, but, as has proved to be the case, a long dispensational ‘age’ analogous to that of Judaism.

 

Our Lord thus foresaw and foretold as definitely and clearly as possible, both in parabolic and plain predictions,

 

1. The fall of Judaism as a religion;

 

2. The destruction of Jerusalem as a city, and of the temple as a sanctuary;

 

3. A time of great tribulation, and of prolonged dispersion of the Jewish people;

 

4. An age-long desolation of the land, and Gentile doinination of Jerusalem.

 

Here are four distinct elements of the future; and it should be noted that any one of the four might have happened without the other three. The religious economy of Judaism might have come to an end without the political extinction of the nation; the city and temple might have been destroyed and rebuilt within a century, as after the Babylonian captivity; the Jews might have been scattered and restored,  or Jerusalem might, like Nineveh, or Palmyra, or Ephesus, have lain long in its ruins without being trodden down by Gentile occupants all those ages. The foreview given on this one point alone was no simple, obvious one, easy to invent, certain to be realized. On the contrary, it picks its way carefully amidst a crowd of probabilities, possibilities, contingencies of all kinds. It announced, simply and authoritatively, the future will be thus and thus, at a time when no human wisdom or prescience could have decidedout of a thousand contingencieswhich was even most likely to occur.

 

An elaborate series of events, embracing complicated, intricate, and long-continued episodes of Jewish and Gentile history, which it has taken volume upon volume to record,  is predicted in a few sharp, clear sentences. The prophecy is precisely such a one as no pretender to supernatural prescience would have ventured on. But just as there are portraits, landscapes, sea pictures, and cloud scapes that could only have been painted from the actual sight of the originals, so this outline of the future of the Jews, uttered 1, 800 years ago by Jewish lips, amid scenes of Jewish peace and prosperity, could only have been drawn by One whose all-seeing eye could gaze on events which lay at the time hidden in the womb of the future.

 

For we need scarcely tell how history justified the daring predictions. The tragic and wonderful story is so familiar that it suffices to recall our knowledge of it in the briefest way. Who has not shuddered over the pages of Josephus, as he narrates, with the exactness of an eye-witness, the episodes of the long drawn-out agony, all the more painfully impressive because the tale is traced by a Jewish pen? If we inquire of this writer, Did many fall by the sword, as Jesus here predicted?humanity itself sickens over the reply. Christian faith in considering it exclaims in awe: Behold ‘the severity of God, ‘the proof that severity is as truly one of His attributes as ‘goodness.’ We may not quote Josephus, for his story is far too full. The following summary from the pages of Bishop Newton will recall some of the facts so vividly described in full in his ‘Wars of the Jews’

 

‘The number of those who ‘fell by the edge of the sword’ was indeed very great. Of those who perished during the whole siege, there were, ‘ as Josephus says, 1, 100, 000 Many were also slain at other times and in other places. By the command of Florus, who was the first author of the war, there were slain at Jerusalem 3, 600; by the inhabitants of Cxsarea, above 20, 000; at Scythopolis, above 13, 000; at Ascalon, 2, 500, and at Ptolemais, 2, 000. At Alexandria, under Tiberius Alexander, the president, 50, 000; at Joppa, when it was taken by Cestius Gallus, 8, 400 in a mountain called Asamon, near Sepphoris, above 2, 000; at Dainasens, lo, ooo; in a battle with the Romans at Ascalon, 50, 000; in an ambuscade near the same place, 8, ooo; at Japha, 15, 000 of the Samaritans, upon Mount Gerizim, t, 600; at Jotapha, 40, 000; at Joppa, when taken by Vespasian, 4, 200; at Tarichea, 6, 500, and after the city was taken, 5, 200; at Gamala, 4, 000 slain, besides 5, 000 who threw themselves down a precipice; of those who fled with John from Gisehala, 6, 000; of the Gadarenes, 15, 000 slain, besides an infinite number drowned; in the villages of Idumea, above 10, 000 slain; at Gerasa, 1, 900; at Machaerus, 1, 700; in the wood of Jardes, 3, 000; in the castle of Massada, 960; in Cyrene, by Catullus, the governor, 3, 000. Besides these, many of every age, sex, and condition were slain in this war, who are not reckoned but of these who are reckoned, the number amounts to about 1, 35 7, 660, which would appear almost incredible if their own historian had not so particularly enumerated them.

 

But, besides the Jews who ‘fell by the edge of the sword, ‘ others were also to be led away captive into all nations; and, considering the number of the slain, the number of the captives too was very great. There were taken, particularly, at Japha, 2, 530; at Jotapha, 1, 200. At Tarichea, 6, ooo chosen young men were sent to Nero, the rest sold, to the number of 30, 400, besides those who were given to Agrippa: of the Gadarenes, 2, 200; in Idumea, above 5, 000. Many, besides these, were taken at Jerusalem, so that, as Josephus himself informs us, ‘The number of the captives taken in the whole war amounted to 97, 000. The tall and handsome young men Titus reserved for his triumph; of the rest, those above seventeen years of age were sent to the works in Egypt; but most were distributed through the Roman provinces, to be destroyed in their theatres by the sword or by the wild beasts. Those under seventeen were sold for slaves. Of these captives, many underwent hard fate. Eleven thousand of them perished for want. Titus exhibited all sorts of shows and spectacles at Caesarea; and many of the captives were there destroyed, some being exposed to the wild beasts, and others compelled to fight in troops against one another. At Caesarea, too, in honour of his brother’s birthday, 2, 500 Jews were slain; and a great number likewise at Berytus, in honour of his father’s. The like was done in other cities of Syria. Those whom he reserved for his triumph were Simon and John, the generals of the captives, and seven hundred others of remarkable stature and beauty. Thus were the Jews miserably tormented and distributed over the Roman provinces; and are they not still distressed, and dispersed over all the nations of the earth? Written 1888 A.D.

 

‘As the Jews were ‘to be led away captive into all nations, ‘ so Jerusalem was to be ‘trodden down of the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled.’ And accordingly Jerusalem has never since been in the possession of the Jews, but hath constantly been in subjection to some other nation, as first to the Romans, and afterwards to the Saracens, and then to the Francs, and then to the Mamelucs, and now to the Turks.’ ’Newton’s Dissertation, ‘ p. 414

 

The Emperor Hadrian, whose first name was.Ælius, placed a Roman colony on the site of Jerusalem, and built there a city, which he called, after himself, ÆLIA. It had a temple dedicated to Jupiter Capitolinus. The erection of the temple excited to revolt the remnant of the Jews left in Palestine. They rose in rebellion under Barchochab, a robber and murderer, and then came the final catastrophe, the last act of the tragedy in the land, in AD. 135.

 

‘The Jews were at length subdued with most terrible slaughter: fifty of their strongest castles and 985 of their best towns were sacked and demolished; 580, 000 men fell by the sword in battle, besides an infinite multitude who perished by famine and sickness and fire, so that Judea was almost all desolated.

 

‘The Jewish writers themselves reckon that doubly more Jews were slain in this war than came out of Egypt; and that their sufferings und~r Nebuchadnezzar and Titus were not so great as what they endured under the Emperor Adrian. Of the Jews who survived this second ruin of their nation, an incredible number of every age and sex were sold like horses, and dispersed over the face of the earth. The emperor completed his design, rebuilt the city, re-established the colony, ordered the statue of a hog in marble to be set up over the gate that opened towards Bethlehem, and published an edict strictly forbidding any Jew, upon pain of death, to enter the city, or so much as to look upon it at a distance.’ ’Newton’s Dissertation, ‘ p. 415.

 

The tears which Israel’s Messiah shed over Jerusalem and her children welled up from eyes that foresaw what was corningforesaw all this and much more of the same sort.

 

For 1, 800 years exile, persecution, and cruel oppression have, as we showed in the Mosaic section, been the portion of the Jewish nationfor all that we have recalled here was only the beginning of sorrows. The entire interval up to the time of the French revolution at the end of last century was to Israel a time of great tribulation, though its extremest severity was not continuous, but intermittent. Our century has seen a very marked change in the fortunes and condition of the Jews, for the times of the Gentiles are well-nigh over, and Israel’s long story is not finished yet. It is only beginning, indeed, for it will need eternity to tell it all.

 

Twice over our Lord employed the important little word ’until’ in His predictions of these Jewish experiences. Your house is left unto you desolate, He said, until ye are ready to welcome, instead of reject, Me; and Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles until their age has run its appointed course. What do these limits mean? If a judge says to a criminal, ‘You are to remain in prison until five years have run their course, ‘ what does he imply? If an architect says, ‘I will not begin to rebuild that house until funds have been secured for the purpose, ‘ what is the inference? He who foretold the present doom of Israel indicated its limits, and indicated also what would follow.

 

For Christ foretold His own return, as well as His departureHis return to reign on earth and over Israel, as the prophets of the Old Testament had promised. He did not set aside the Jewish hope for ever, hut only postponed it for a time, and revealed an intermediate dispensation. The gifts and calling of God are without repentance. The kingdom promised to Israel under their Messiah cannot be fulfilled by the present Gentile dispensation, while Christ is in heaven and the Jews under great tribulation. It is derogatory to the truth and inspiration of Scripture to suppose it! The angel, in announcing the birth of Jesus, predicted that He should be great, and that the Lord God would give unto Him the throne of His father David; that He should reign over the house of Jacob for ever, and that of His kingdom there should be no end. This prediction has yet to be fulfilled. It is not and cannot be fulfilled by the present kingdom of heaven. On the contrary, Christ predicted that He would establish it at His second advent. He sets His seal to all the old predictions, and adds new ones. The kingdom, He tells them, when it does come, will be a far more glorious one than they imagined. The Son of man will come in clouds, with power and great glory. He will send forth His angels, and gather His elect. He will come in the glory of His Father, and of the holy angels, and sit on the throne of His glory. He will reckon with His servants, and award places of honour in the kingdom to His faithful followers. {#Lu 22:29} But Israel’s repentance would have to be the preliminary. ‘Until’ then they would see Him no more. All this was in perfect harmony with Old Testament prophecy, with Zechariah xi. and xii., and many other passages. As all this is, however, at present unfulfilled prophecy, we do not dwell on it here.

 

We have now seen what the program given by Christ was in its negative aspect. The coming age would not be a continuation of Judaism. The favoured nation, which for 2, 000 years had been the channel of revelation, and the sole witness for the living and true God in an idolatrous pagan world, was to be removed from the position of which its rejection of Christ had proved it unworthy. This predicted destruction of Jerusalem and the temple, with which Jexvish ritual worship was inseparably connected, involved a change in God’s providential action towards mankind. What would be substituted for Judaism? What was the positive side of the prophetic program presented by our Lord Jesus?

 

He announced THE RISE, CHARACTER, COURSE, AND ISSUES OF AN ENTIRELY NEW AND PREVIOUSLY UNPRECEDENTED ECONOMY OF DIVINE PROVIDENCE, of which He speaks under the name of ‘the kingdom of heaven.’ He did not Himself personally reveal all that the program was to contain on this subject. Much could not properly be revealed until after His resurrection. As we shall presently see, this part of the prophecy was left to be communicated subsequently, through the inspired apostles. But Jesus Himself sketched its outline. He neither defined fully what the true Church would be, nor what the outward professing Church, which we call Christendom, would be. That was foretold later on. But He gave similitudes of the coming ‘kingdom of heaven, ‘ which prove that the eighteen Christian centuries lay naked and open before His all-seeing eye, though during the days of His flesh a full disclosure would have been premature.

 

This ‘kingdom of heaven, ‘ or present spiritual kingdom of God on earth, must be broadly distinguished from the other kingdom of which we have just spoken. It is in mystery only a kingdom, not in manifestation. None can see its King or its court, its hosts or its palaces, nor even distinguish its subjects, by any outward sign, from its enemies. Christ speaks of ’the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, ‘ and He paints it as wonderfully different from the earthly kingdom of God which Israel had been expecting, and which, owing to their rejection of its King, was postponed sine die,  and is still future. That kingdom was to be introduced by the return of the King in power and great glory, characterized by His personal presence, by His session on the throne of David, and by the exaltation of repentant and restored Israel. This kingdom, on the other hand, exists during the absence of the King in heaven, runs its course during His Melchizedek session on the throne of God, and coincides with the time of Israel’s dispersion and rejection. The two are contrasted in every respect: the one is a rule on earth, the other a rule from heaven; the one is over peoples and nations, the other is over the hearts and lives of Christ’s disciples mainly, though involving also a hidden providential government of the world; it is an invisible rule, a mysterious sway, an intangible dominion; it is a kind of kingdom of which the Jews had no conception, and of which the disciples themselves were slow to catch the idea; it was one which had never been clearly predicted in the Old Testament, and they had failed to understand the hints of it which the prophets had given; it was practically a new revelation. Hence our Lord began His gradual unfolding of it in simple parables, in order that the homely analogies might make way for the novel conception.

 

Combining all the intimations given by its Founder as to this kingdom of heaven, we must now deduce, from the mass of parable and prediction in the Gospels, the positive side, or Christian aspect, of Christ’s program of the future.

 

And first,  in His prophetic parables, our Lord foretold that the coming dispensation, or kingdom of heaven, would have no national limits, but be cosmopolitanuniversal in its scope. ‘The field’ of Divine operation would in future be ‘the world.’ This was a novel and most startling idea for Jewish minds, and the disciples sought an explanation of what to them seemed so strange, though to us so simple and familiar. The world? Yes. ‘The field is the world.’ As if He had said: In the future no one nation will enjoy any religious advantages more than another. All distinction of Jew and Gentile will be done away. The revelation of God will be for all, to all. There will be no planting and hedging of a vineyard. ‘The field is the world.’ Absolute equality of religious privileges among men, irrespective of nationality, is here clearly predicted.

 

Secondly,  the future operations of God in this field would be dissimilar in character from any past operations of His in the world. He would establish no outward visible theocracy nor ritual religious service. He would enact no new code of laws, as from Sinai, nor establish ceremonial worship and a separate priesthood. He would work no special miracles of preservation and deliverance for His people; on the contrary, His action would be like that of a sower sowing the seed. ‘Behold, a sower went forth to sow.’ The new dispensation would be marked by a wide distribution of living seed; that is, by a world-wide diffusion of truthliving and life-giving truth. Hence its one great ordinance would not be, as of old, sacrifice, but preaching, teaching, imparting to men the word of God. The Sower’s object was to diffuse His precious seed, and the seed possessed, latent in itself, the powers of life and of self-multiplication. All life comes from seed, and tends to produce seed, which, in its turn, gives birth to new life. The kingdom of heaven would grow, by inward life-power, from small beginnings to immense development. The seed would grow secretly, the progress of the kingdom of heaven would be by the hidden and concealed operations of spiritual life; for as seed is capable of being quickened into wondrous action, so the word